Abstract
This paper attempts to present the journey of mental suffering in Jed Parry, one of the major characters in Enduring Love. In this regard, it is noted that this journey begins and questions the borders of Self and Other in life and boundaries of love. Jed Parry is perceived as a religious fanatic and what comes next is Jed’s obsession with Joe and his attempt to convince him that they are in love, and at the same time Joe is preoccupied with the idea that Jed is obsessed with him. We present a close reading of Enduring Love by elucidating some of the psychoanalytical reflections on Jed via the lens of child-mother conceptual theory. Specifically, we explore the psychic anxieties and the influence of this early female figure on Jed’s interactions in light of Object Relations Theory of the psychoanalysis attributable to the Fairbairnian, Kleinnian, and Winnicottian analytic traditions. We trace the psychoanalytical origins of Jed’s anxieties and tensions into childhood and also highlight a much earlier female (mother) influence. We will show how deprivation from the establishment of a satisfying contact with this primary love object (mother) can wreak havoc in the character’s psyche and cause his ego to move towards establishing relations with his internal objects instead of natural, real objects in his external world.
Highlights
Enduring Love lends itself to a psychoanalytical reading
The traumatic relationships that Jed has established with Joe in Enduring Love, we suggest, are rooted in his early, unsatisfying object relationships, and throughout the novel the adult Joe considers his (Jed’s) aggressive tendencies towards Joe originate in his childhood anxieties and frustrations and these tendencies are the attempts he performs to cope with his relational difficulties
Employing this conceptualization has enabled us to conclude that the failure of Jed Parry in Enduring Love to establish satisfactory and lasting relationships with the others is due primarily to his unsatisfactory child-mother relationships in his early childhood which in his adulthood, are manifested in his lack of self-confidence from a weakened ego, which in turn creates conflicts and anxieties in his psyche that hamper his relationships with the other characters
Summary
Enduring Love lends itself to a psychoanalytical reading. The characters in this novel fail to bring a relationship to fulfillment because of their psychological and emotional inadequacies and it is with the aid of the Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott’s theory of object relations that one is able to pin point the causes for such conflicts and anxieties of these characters and trace that they are the result of a failure to relate satisfactorily to their respective primary caregivers in their early childhood. Many scholars have critically praised and shown McEwan’s obsession with portrayals of psychic tensions in his works but they often interpret this obsession in terms of McEwan’s private life, his unhappy marriage to his first wife, and the nervous breakdowns that McEwan has experienced (Slay, 1991; Byrnes, 1999; Cowley, 1997; P.H.S., 1997) These psychic issues have often been treated either in an amalgamation of psychoanalytical approaches and not within an organized frame that would reveal the possible connections among them or relied on Freudian studies rather than pre-Oedipal object relations viewpoint. Jed calls him unexpectedly and they meet up Jed reveals that he feels a connection to Joe that far exceeds their shared involvement in the hot air-balloon accident. “what the narrator excludes is often what the narrator is thinking about, and what’s missing from the story is often what the story is trying to tell you” (Adams, 2004)
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